The American feminist movement has twice mobilized for constitutional change. The constitutional amendment secured by the firstwave feminist movement is no longer of consequence, while the constitutional amendment sought by the second-wave feminist movement was never ratified. Yet today, courts and commentators agree that the Constitution guarantees women equality, even if that guarantee was ne...

Teachers of Australian federal constitutional law now have three current casebooks available to them: the Winterton, Lee, Glass and Thomson casebook (“WLGT”), Hanks and Cass, Australian Constitutional Law: Materials and Commentary (“HC”), now in its sixth edition, and Blackshield and Williams, Australian Constitutional Law & Theory (“BW”), which has entered a second edition. The recent publicat...

As the number of federal criminal laws has increased over the past decade, so, too, has the intensity with which scholars debate the role of federal law generally. However, in their debate, the scholars focus largely on matters of legislative policy. They essentially ask the question, “How far should Congress go when creating new federal law?” Professor George Brown seeks to answer a different ...

Over the past twenty years there has been an explosion in the creation, availability, and use of criminal justice databases. Large scale database systems now routinely influence law enforcement decisions ranging from formal determinations to arrest or convict an individual to informal judgments to subject a person to secondary pre-flight screening or investigate possible gang membership. Eviden...

judge Richard Posner's well-known view is that constitutional theory is useless. And judge J Harvie Wilkinson III has lambasted constitutional theory for the way in which its "cosmic" aspirations threaten democratic self-governance. Many other judges hold similar views. And yet both Posner and Wilkinson-in the papular press, in law review articles, and in books-have advocated what appear to be ...

The Supreme Court’s plurality opinion in Baze v. Rees begins with a seemingly simple assertion of constitutional law. “We begin with the principle, settled by Gregg, that capital punishment is constitutional.” It continues, “[i]t necessarily follows that there must be a means of carrying it out.” This second pronouncement provides the foundation for the Supreme Court’s holding in Baze that Kent...

This article examines the extent and nature of the use offoreign law in constitutional adjudication in common law systems outside the United States, with special reference to Australia. Demonstrating that the courts of other common law jurisdictions use foreign case law readily, naturally, and for a variety ofpurposes, the article reaches two broad conclusions: (1) as a generalization, other co...